Eastern Ukraine slips further into chaos as violence flares and mayor shot

Ukrainian police and sniffer dogs examine the place where Gennady Kernes was shot and wounded in KharkivPhoto: Sophiya Bobok/ Getty

By Roland Oliphant, in Donetsk and Harriet Salem in Slavyansk

9:08PM BST 28 Apr 2014

The mayor of Ukraine's second largest city was fighting for his life on Monday after an assassination attempt in broad daylight and an eruption of street violence in Donetsk dragged the east of the country further into chaos.

Gennady Kernes, who has been mayor of the eastern city of Kharkiv since 2010, was out jogging when he was shot in the back at about midday local time.

Gennady Kernes, the pro-Russian mayor of Kharkiv (Reuters)

The attempted murder came as pro-Russian militia seized police buildings in yet another town in the Donetsk region, consolidating their hold on a strategic highway around the town of Slavyansk.

Later in the evening pro-Russian protesters armed with bats attacked a pro-Ukrainian march in Donetsk, leaving at least five people hospitalised with head wounds.

Trouble started at 6.30pm local time (4.30pm UK) as over 1000 pro-Ukrainians gathered for a march in the centre of the industrial city in the early evening.

Police largely stood by as a mob of several hundred pro-Russian activists, some armed with metal bars and baseball bats, ambushed the march from behind shortly after it began, attacking both marchers and bystanding journalists.

After the clash, in which protesters from both sides were injured, the pro-Ukrainian marchers apparently fled, leaving a large pro-Russian crowd prowling the streets and forcing some riot police to lay their shields on the ground.

The violence capped another day of rising tensions that saw Mr Kernes hospitalised after a bullet punctured one lung and his liver, leaving him in a critical condition.

"He is currently on the operating table in a hospital emergency room. Doctors are fighting for his life," his office said in a statement on Monday afternoon.

Mr Kernes suffered a serious abdominal injury from a single shot, but was operated on successfully, it was later reported.

Mr Kernes is a member of former president Viktor Yanukovych's Party of the Regions, and was a vocal opponent of the pro-European protest movement that brought down Mr Yanukovych in February. He has since vacillated between support for the pro-Russian movement and backing the new government in Kiev.

Mikhail Dobkin, the Party of the Regions' presidential candidate and a former governor of Kharkiv region and close ally of Mr Kernes, said on Monday that he believed the gunman had been aiming to kill.

"I can say this shot was aimed to kill, to the heart," he told Interfax Ukraine. "And I can say it was only due to a happy coincidence that he was not killed." Oleksandr Turchynov, the interim president, ordered an investigation into the attempted killing.

Ukrainian police experts with sniffer dogs examine the place where Gennady Kernes was shot and wounded in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine (Sophiya Bobok/ Getty)

Kharkiv is a major industrial and university city just 20 miles from the Russian border, and has been seen as a potential flashpoint in the on-going struggle for control of eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian rebels and the interim government in Kiev.

But while the city has seen pro-Russian disturbances in recent weeks, separatist activists have failed to establish a foothold there similar to those in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Pro-Russian demonstrators briefly occupied the regional administration building in the city centre earlier this month, but were swiftly evicted by police.

The attack on Mr Kernes came as rebels based in Slavyansk, 100 miles to the south, seized control of yet another town on the highway to the regional capital of Donetsk.

About 20 heavily armed gunmen took over the police station and town hall in Konstantinovka on Monday morning before unarmed volunteers began to build barricades around the occupied buildings, in an attack which closely followed the pattern of earlier occupations in neighbouring towns.

The pro-Russian rebels who seized the state buildings said they met with no resistance from local law enforcement officials. "We took it without a single shot being fired, we have the popular support," said Hans, a balaclava-clad gunman who also claimed the police had defected to "join with the people".

A reported firefight at the government-held airfield near Kramatorsk also ended without any deaths.

Eyewitnesses said soldiers returned fire when the base came under attack from its Western side at about 8 AM this morning.

Ukrainian troops were on high alert at the strategically important site on Monday afternoon, with snipers moving through the trees outside the perimeter threatening to shoot anyone who attempted to approach.

But there seemed to be little enthusiasm amongst the troops for engaging in combat. "We shot back because we were commanded to do so," said Roman, a 27-year-old soldier from Kiev stationed inside the base, "but we don't want to fire on our own people, we just want to go home."

Tensions in the area around Slavyansk are high since Mr Tuychynov re-launched an "anti-terrorist" operation to dislodge rebels late last week.

But Ukrainian forces have made no further move towards the city since skirmishes on Friday left up to five people dead.

The Ukraine Security Service said on Monday that pro-Russian separatists were now holding more than 40 hostages, most of them jailed in Slavyansk.

The prisoners include journalists, Ukrainian security officers, and seven European military officers and a translator who were part of an OSCE observer mission when they were detained as they tried to enter Slavyansk on Friday.

Rebel leaders have said they will seek a prisoner exchange for the release of the observers.